Personas take web marketers beyond what they think they know about customers and into shoppers’ heads and hearts
By Elizabeth Gardner
A lost wallet lies on a Manhattan street, stuffed with cash. A white middle-income male New Yorker, between 30 and 44, picks it up. Will he look for the rightful owner, or pocket the cash? Who knows?
But if George Costanza, the white middle-income male New Yorker between 30 and 44 from Seinfeld, picks it up, everyone knows exactly what he’ll do. He’ll almost certainly keep the money, yapping endless self-justification to his friends at the coffee shop to conceal his feelings of guilt.
George is one possible human face for his demographic group, but hardly the only one (thank goodness). Demographics—age, race, sex, income, location—don’t go very far in explaining and predicting human behavior. That’s why marketers increasingly use personas—named profiles that represent members of each key customer group, and describe their characters, personalities, tastes, and quirks. It’s hard to target a message to a generic 35-year-old middle-class working mother of two. It’s much easier to target a message to Jennifer, who has two children under four, works as a paralegal, and is always looking for quick but healthy dinners and ways to spend more time with her kids and less time on housework.
Personas go way beyond typical segmentation, says Neil Clemmons, president of strategy at Critical Mass, a web design firm with an extensive persona development practice. “The idea is to get into the heads of customers and start to put a face to the experience,” he says. “We’ve ridden in cars with people for Mercedes and gone shopping with people for Albertson’s (the grocery chain). We note how they cook, plan menus, use coupons and shop specials. We sometimes ask people to keep a log of a remodeling project or a diary of their Christmas shopping. It’s a combination of questioning and observation.”
Same type, different needs
For example, a project for Home Depot uncovered two very different customers who might have identical demographic profiles—the do-it-yourselfer who wants to pick out all the cabinets and appliances and the customer who wants a kitchen designer to do it all.
While the concept of persona marketing has been around since the late 1990s and is used in many contexts, it has particular relevance to Internet businesses. “People use web sites to get things done,” says Moira Dorsey, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “It’s different from designing other marketing materials. You have to understand what your customers’ goals are and how they go about accomplishing them in order to design a system that supports those goals.” A Forrester survey from late 2005 showed that more than one in four companies with revenues above $200 million planned to increase their spending on persona research over the next two years.
Retailers of every size, from office supply giant Staples Inc. to the skin care boutique H2O Plus, are using persona development as part of their web strategies. Some personas sound like characters out of a medieval morality play—Lisa Listmaker, Shelley Spontaneous, Mr. Competitive. Others go just by first names—Marie or Mike or Helen—and become their company’s shorthand for the customer who depends on product reviews, or the one who likes to build things himself, or the one whose top priority is getting a great price.
The costs and time for persona development vary wildly. Some companies spend six figures on ethnographic research worthy of an anthropology dissertation, interviewing dozens or hundreds of users to put together a handful of carefully crafted composite profiles. Most large web design firms offer persona development services, and dozens of smaller companies specialize in it.
Others make do with internal analytics and brainstorming, ideally aided by an outside consultant. “If you need the deepest level of insight because you’re going to plan something from the ground up, that’s a six-figure engagement,” says Howard Kaplan, chief operating officer at FutureNow, a web site optimization firm that does persona work based on the Myers-Briggs personality test. “If you have something up and running that’s not doing as well as it should and you want to use personas to see if you’re missing your target audience, that’s probably more like five figures—sometimes low five figures. We don’t need a ton of data, but we do need to hear anecdotal experiences, and stories that we can see patterns in.”
The high margin twins
Successful persona users have seen their conversion rates and revenues jump. While persona work usually occurs as part of a larger redesign project, making it hard to pinpoint the specific payback, Staples’ online revenue went from $3 billion to $4.9 billion within two years after a major site redesign that included the development of seven personas and a decision to design primarily for the two most important ones.
“We didn’t want to go into the redesign without something like personas to help guide the discussion,” says Colin Hynes, director of usability at Staples.com. The company was able to use its thousands of hours of existing customer research to create the basic personas, which it validated through one-to-one surveys with 1,000 customers. In the process, Staples also identified two personas that represented way more than their share of both revenue and margin, and planned its new home page accordingly.
“You can’t design anything, and especially not a home page, for seven different types of users,” Hynes says. “You end up with a Frankenstein that doesn’t meet anyone’s needs.” One of the winners was Lisa Listmaker, who likes to come to the site with her shopping list all prepared and her item numbers at the ready. Not only is she high-margin, but she’s also low maintenance—no coupons clutter her checkout process. For her, “order by number” is prominently featured above the fold.
A much less important persona, Sally Sales, still accounts for a not-insignificant 8% of margin—for her, the clearance area was made easier to find and navigate.
Revealing the unknown customer
Jim McLaughlin, director of business development at H2O Plus, says persona research carried out in collaboration with web design firm Elevation Inc. uncovered several distinct types of customers that the company didn’t realize it had. After setting up a data warehouse to sift through the wealth of information from the web site, the retail stores and catalog sales, Elevation interviewed customers to fill out the psychological, motivational pieces of the puzzle. “Your knowledge is in little bits everywhere, from interacting with customers, interviewing them, looking in their medicine cabinets, watching them put on their makeup,” he says. “When a third party compiles it into personas, you read them and everything kind of clicks.” For example, the research showed that the web site got significant sales from Asian college students studying in the U.S.—a group whose needs were different from those of customers in Asia.
Another unique group was people who had stayed at Disney resorts, which carry various H2O Plus products as amenities in the rooms. The web site now points out which products are featured at Disney, to help those customers track down their favorites.
A site redesign using personas has boosted H2O Plus’s conversion rate from the 5% range into “the high sixes,” McLaughlin said, and shopping cart abandonment has dropped below 60%.
Elevation CEO Adam Heneghan estimates that each client needs six to 10 personas. Too few, and each is too broad to be useful; too many, and things just get confusing. Also, personas are client-specific: the same customer might fit a different persona for each site he visits, depending on whether he’s buying office supplies, shopping for a new bike, or ordering a romantic dinner for two.
Targeting and triage
Personas can serve several functions during a site design or overhaul. First, they keep designers from putting undue emphasis on their own tastes. “Everything is designed for someone,” says Harley Manning, vice president and research director at Forrester Research. “It should be designed for the intended user or customer or prospect, but too often it’s designed to please the designer. That’s fine if you’re targeting art school graduates.” Personas help designers see things from their customers’ point of view.
Personas let marketing and sales people step into the shoes of a customer who doesn’t live and breathe their product line the way they do. “Marketers tend to use jargon and not explain things that they think are obvious,” Manning says. “They focus on features that may mean little or nothing to the customer.”
Personas also help with what user interface consultant Tamara Adlin, president of Adlin Inc., calls “feature triage,” or making the tough decisions when the budget won’t cover every possible bell and whistle. Companies can prioritize personas based on their business objectives, as Staples did with its pair of high-margin personas. Adlin created the customer experience team at Amazon Services, which does research and site design for Amazon’s platform customers, and co-authored the book The Persona Lifecycle. She gives the example of a baby boutique site. “From a brand perspective, is it more important to appeal to Mom or Dad?” she asks. “If the mom is your objective, you’ll probably catch the dad dolphin in that tuna net, as long as you don’t make everything pink. But the priority is to make sure Mom has her needs and goals met.” If the site only has enough budget to please the mom or the dad, and the research shows that the two need different features, then the mom-oriented features should win.
There are several methods for developing personas, and each has its passionate advocates. The most expensive and in-depth method involves one-on-one research within the subject’s home or shopping environment, akin to what anthropologists do when studying a foreign culture.
Forrester’s Manning says there’s no substitute. He recalls an interview with a customer in a store who had just bought a flat screen TV. “He described himself as someone who always gets a good deal, but in fact, he never got one,” Manning says. The customer saw the TV, decided to buy it without any research (even though he described himself as a person who always does research) and at the last minute asked the clerk for a better price. The clerk knocked off 10% from the full list price, which brought it down to a few hundred dollars more than he would have paid if he had gone to a shopping engine and ordered from the low-price web site.
“His real goal was to feel that he got a good deal,” rather than to actually get a good deal Manning says. “He will probably never understand that about himself. He has margin written all over him.” And a face-to-face interview is the key to understanding that particular nuance and many others.
The hard-to-reach personas
Forrester estimates that it costs about $50,000 for this type of persona project, with 21 interviews resulting in four personas. Costs can easily run into six figures for projects requiring more personas, interviews with hard to reach people like physicians or CEOs, or participation from customers on several continents.
Adlin says this approach is overkill for many companies. She runs persona development workshops that take advantage of internal knowledge. “You’re not sending someone to the moon,” she says.
Companies know more about their customers than they think. Adlin helps them uncover their hidden assumptions and devise trial personas that everyone can agree on. The third-party perspective is essential, to keep stereotypes at bay and get everyone to focus, but the groups almost always uncover useful insights. “The power is so strong that it outweighs the risk of creating the wrong personas,” Adlin says. “They won’t be that wrong—they’ll be in the right neighborhood. Then you can go out and get external research to answer the questions you still have.”
Mr. In-Between
FutureNow’s approach is somewhere in between. It takes a company’s existing data—web analytics, customer service feedback, any stories that the staff can come up with—and compares it with a standard personality-analysis matrix to produce four to six types that compose the bulk of a site’s customers.
Detoxologie, a site offering various nutritional cleansing regimens, came to FutureNow because its demographics were all over the map, says founder Steve Franzman. “Our customers were everybody and we didn’t know how to deal with them,” he says. Moreover, the site’s conversion rate was less than 1%, not enough to break even, and sales were choppy. A pay-per-click expenditure of $1,000 might yield $3,000 in sales or $600.
FutureNow analyzed the company’s data and came up with several personas who had distinctly different buying modes. Detoxologie tore up its web site and started from scratch, adding extensive background information for buyers who wanted to do more research, testimonials and endorsements for those who need feedback from others, and menus that made it simple to navigate to products for specific conditions, for those who were ready to buy.
These days, conversions average 4%, and the return on pay-per-click is consistently 2 to 1.
Though full-blown persona research can be daunting, any retailer can make a start. “We can look at a customer’s existing research and call logs and put it together with industry best practices and learnings from other retailers,” says Clemmons of Critical Mass. “We can start developing something from that. For a small retailer, it could be as simple as sitting with half a dozen customers in a coffee shop and asking them how they make decisions.”
Elizabeth Gardner is a Riverside, Ill.-based freelance business writer.
